I will attempt to describe my problem. In the past I used Non Unicode datatype columns as source and as destination (=a kind of staging database). Due to circumstances and support of exotic characters, I have both source and destination columns changed to Unicode (from varchar to nvarchar). •In the old way (varchar to varchar) running approx. 30 packages after eachother --> results: 38 minutes runtime•In the new way (nvarchar to nvarchar) running approx. 30 packages after eachother --> results: 32 minutes runtime

Can someone explain why runtime is becoming faster while using datatypes which consume more bytes of data (sizing). I was expecting that performance would decrease slightly. The opposite is proven in my test results.

Has anyone got any ideas? I was thinking that maybe SSIS handles each text source as Unicode anyway during execution and that's why there is improvement because SSIS does not have to convert twice.

Additional info, most common used components in the packages: •I'm using an OLEDB source component (SQL Server Native Client 10.0)•Lookup components on a cache connection file (also changed from varchar to nvarchar)•And an OLEDB Destination (Fast Load)